Reports

The world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. For those in the North, that can seem abstract; for the rural poor in the developing world, it’s all too real. Their absolute dependence on the bounty of forests, deserts and coasts means ‘biodiversity loss’ can mean losing all: food, fuel, building material, medicine, forage, livelihoods and culture.

The good news is that it can work the other way. Poor communities, as long-term stewards of the South’s natural riches, are steeped in profound knowledge about them. As this pocketbook shows, working with them can reverse the downward spiral of environmental degradation. By banking on biodiversity, we can protect our natural legacy while tackling poverty locally, nationally and globallyRead More

Since January 2005, this action-research project has focused on developing alternative tools to protect traditional knowledge which are rooted in local customary laws rather than based on existing Intellectual Property standards. Existing IPRs (eg. patents, copyrights) are largely unsuitable for protecting rights over traditional knowledge because they provide commercial incentives, whereas traditional innovations are driven primarily by subsistence needs. Survival from nature requires continual access to new knowledge and innovations – ie. collective rather than exclusive rights. To sustain biodiversity-based lifestyles, communities need to maintain control over their knowledge and related bio-resources and prevent others from unfairly exploiting or appropriating them, while taking advantage of market opportunities themselves. Many communities are facing increasing threats to their resource rights due to the spread of western IPRs (eg. patents and PBRs), often through Free Trade Agreements. IPRs can confer rights over community resources to others (eg. if they are mis-granted or granted too easily) and do not require consent or benefit-sharing when community resources are used by others . Limiting rights to use, sell or exchange a bioresource can be a serious problem if your livelihood depends on it. The project explored customary laws, values and practices relating to TK and biodiversity with indigenous and local communities in Peru, Panama, India, China and Kenya; and developed local tools for protecting TK and biocultural systems. It sought to inform national and international policy on TK and ABS, and to facilitate local implementation of global policy (eg. the CBD). The community level work was complemented by policy and literature reviews, and discussion with other stakeholdersRead More

Degradation of natural resources in the highlands of Usambara has been extensively covered. In the past, farmers in the Usambara’s were practicing effective soil conservation and soil fertility preserving methods like multi-storey agroforestry, mixed cropping and green manuring. Yet these systems and knowledge began crumbling when German colonialism and cash economy made their influence on these highlands which are home to the Wasambaa. It was the German settlers, who, lured by belief that the soils on these highlands were extremely fertile opened up huge plantations of cash crops, started exporting timber, hired local labour and in so doing also introduced the Wasambaa to the cash related agricultural activities. In doing so, the natural resources on these highlands began degrading.Read More

Forest areas in Nepal decreased at a rate of 1.7 percent every year between the end of the 1970s and the mid 1990s. Land degradation leads to soil erosion spelling disaster for poor rural households who are forced to spend more time collecting fodder and fuel which in turn leads to a drop in agricultural labour supply, agricultural production and food security. However, leasehold forestry, an innovative approach introduced by IFAD in the early 1990s, has the potential to reverse this trend. Forty-year leases are provided to groups of households giving them user rights over plots of degraded forest land. They rehabilitate the land by banning grazing and by stall-feeding their livestock, and use and sell forest products such as timber, fuel wood and fodder.

Two main approaches aiming to cope with forest degradation have been tested in Nepal in the last 25 years. Community forestry, a flagship programme for several international organisations, consists of preventative measures to protect well-stocked forest areas against over-exploitation. Community forestry has achieved impressive results but has not always benefited the poorest households; it only recently included provisions for the most disadvantaged. Leasehold forestry, through the IFAD-supported Hills Leasehold Forestry and Fodder Development Project, envisaged a direct transfer of land assets to the very poor. The leasehold approach adopted so far is costly, however, and needs adapting into a simpler, cheaper solution if it is to be scaled up as the Nepalese government intends. Moreover, the legal status of leasehold titles needs clarification whilst provisions for the transfer and inheritance of leases will improve security of tenure.
Key insights from the evaluation include:

Continued collaboration and policy dialogue between the donor agencies supporting ‘community forestry’, and IFAD which supports the leasehold approach is necessary to try to establish common ground between the two approaches to forest degradation and sustainable management.

Forage improvement packages need to be more flexible, to focus on local knowledge and the natural regeneration of plants and trees rather than importing species that are costly and often unsuited to the soils and climate of the Nepalese hillsides.

Better use of technical assistance grants (for IFAD-supported projects) to strengthen project management capacities, train government staff and build sustainable organisations of leaseholders is crucial. Such grants should be accompanied by an exit strategy that progressively reduces subsidies and encourages grassroots institutions, the government and the private sector to take responsibility for financing activities.

Leasehold vs. community forestry: Friction has existed between proponents of community and leasehold schemes. Community forestry programmes cover two thirds of Nepalese districts while leasehold initiatives are at an early stage; community measures target whole communities and concentrate on forest conservation whilst leasehold approaches involve a redistribution of assets in favour of the poor by leasing degraded forest areas to groups of specifically targeted resource-poor farming households. Friction between the two approaches is mainly at the donor level although the two approaches often co-exist at the field level. Fundamental to leasehold replication and up-scaling is enhanced policy dialogue between IFAD and the donor agencies involved in community forestry to increase resources and ease the friction between the two approaches. A second phase of the Hills Leasehold Project should aim to facilitate inter-agency dialogue and improve awareness of IFAD’s activities amongst other development agencies working in Nepal.

Local solutions to local problems: The design of leasehold management plans and technical packages did not pay attention to lower-cost options based on local knowledge of plant species, natural regrowth or on local people’s preferences and basic needs. This also meant that intervention costs were high. Imported fodder tree species, for example, were unsuited to the Nepalese terrain due to insufficient topsoil, steep slopes and limited moisture retention. The project design regarding the provision of subsidised exotic varieties of trees and grasses was too rigid. Instead, research with local farmers is needed, to build on and use their knowledge of local plant and animal species. Communication between farmers and project field staff to identify and promote site-specific livestock packages is also important. Appropriate technological packages can be developed through action research, perhaps with the involvement of university students and successful options disseminated through study tours and fairs. In addition, training programmes (in forest, livestock and land management for example) should focus on practical skills and knowledge rather than be classroom-based and theoretical. They should also be demand driven, responding to the needs and preferences of group members.

Grant-dependency syndrome? Disenchantment with the shortcomings of government agency services has led several donors to create parallel delivery service structures using grant-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Although this has fostered a more pluralistic approach to development, in the forestry sector it has also diverted attention away from the need to invest in the capacity building of government agency staff in particular. NGO input into such training and strengthening of grassroots organisations is essential but by law a number of tasks (such as identification of leasehold plots, preparation of management plans, periodic monitoring of activities) must still be performed by government field staff. Given the high number of grant-funded forestry programmes operating in Nepal, there is a real risk that donors will see such grants as a cure-all for the inadequacies of government services, that the government will become over reliant on grant-funded technical assistance and unable to shake off the dependency.

Putting people first: Although not originally planned for in the project design, grassroots organisations (inter-groups and cooperatives) were invaluable in creating market linkages, improving access to information, providing small-scale financial services and a platform for training and advocacy. The cooperatives (formed by NGOs and registered with the government) facilitate the storage and marketing of products, organise the provision of loans, and provide a forum for decision-making in which women often play a central role. The more informal inter-groups (clusters of leasehold groups) are there to strengthen and institutionalise leasehold groups and prepare them for subsequent formation into cooperatives. Inter-groups facilitate social development activities, recommend group members for loans, training programmes or workshops, encourage savings and have helped resolve conflicts between leasehold and non-leasehold households. It will be important to support the inter-groups and the cooperatives as they prepare to take over implementation of project activities after the project has ended.
&nbspRead More

The Inuit residents of Sachs Harbour, Canada, are struggling to maintain their way of life in the face of climate change. Their lifestyle and culture depends on their ability to adapt to this new challenge.

Given the dramatic changes that local people have observed, IISD and the Hunters and Trappers Committee of Sachs Harbour initiated a year-long project to document the problem of Arctic climate change and communicate it to Canadian and international audiences. The project team worked in partnership with specialists from five organisations to develop an innovative method for recording and sharing local observations on climate change.

The approach combined participatory workshops, semi-structured interviews, community meetings and fieldwork to better understand the extent of local knowledge of climate change. During the year-long initiative, the project team produced a broadcast-quality video and several scientific journal articles to communicate the negative consequences of climate change in the Arctic and to understand the adaptive strategies that local people are using in response. The science papers document Inuvialuit knowledge on climate change and explore how that knowledge can enrich scientific research in the Arctic.Read More

The relationship between the "modern world" and the "developing world" has often been expressed in the language of development. Although vast sums have been invested trying to find a solution matters appear to have got worse rather than better. It would appear that some development projects actually contribute to this deterioration. In addition development has often produced an environmental crisis and the serious depletion of forest resources. A largely neglected aspect of such development is the dominant part played by "modern" or "western scientific" knowledge. Not only is indigenous knowledge ignored or dismissed, but the nature of the problem of underdevelopment and its solution are defined by reference to this world-ordering knowledge. Until very recently little or no credence was given by scientists and scholars grounded in Western tradition to the validity of non-Western indigenous knowledge.

Even now when Western scholars begin to acknowledge the existence of indigenous knowledge they have trouble understanding and interpreting what for them is a foreign level of reality. Since indigenous knowledge generation does not use the same methods of data collection, storage, analysis and interpretation as the scientific tradition, those trained in the scientific tradition have great difficulty in acknowledging the validity of data generated in unfamiliar ways. Even those who do acknowledge the existence of indigenous knowledge generally apply scientific methods to verify and validate indigenous knowledge. They seek to recognize their categories in native systems, and apply their typologies to what they think indigenous knowledge systems are. Few Western scholars are able to accept indigenous knowledge as valid in and of itself. They have great difficulty rethinking groupings so as to uncover basic organising principles which are unfamiliar, and to identify and affirm the integrity of indigenous systems. Recently efforts have been made to think through the implications of recognising fundamentally different knowledge systems. One aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between scientific knowledge systems and indigenous knowledge systems, but before that we need to address the nature of knowledge, knowledge systems, paradigms, and cognitive processes so that we have a conceptual frameworkRead More